A Noob's Guide to Arcane Mage PvP - How and Why

Hello and welcome to my guide! I've been playing Arcane Mage in PvP since Wrath and I'm very happy to say we are at the very best spot we have ever been. Our past weaknesses were mostly the need to charge up Arcane Charges before we could do anything, and a crippling lack of moblity or utlity.

With triple blink, Charged Up and Arcane Orb, most of these downsides are gone leaving us with a powerful class capable of defending itself and dealing both huge burst and massive sustained damage. Without further rambling.... time for stuff:-------------------------------------

Why bring an Arcane Mage to PvP?

If you want :

+ One-shot levels of burst.+ Sustainable damage so high you can out-damage the healing of a healer without even interrupting them.+ Polymorph.+ Counterspell (6 seconds lockout is the longest school lockout there is!).+ Other forms of utility like 时间扭曲 and 群体隐形.

Now this is all fair and well, but I said there is a steep learning curve. This comes in with the fact that it is not so easy to just burst people. People have defensive cooldowns, they have avoidance, and interrupts and cc! To burst someone you need to wait for the proper moment. So, when should you mash the burst macro?

The target has used major defensive cooldowns

Nearby Enemies have either already spent or are not in a position to use their stuns or silences on you

You will have four seconds of free time

And that is where the major difficulty comes from. You need to survive and manuever untill the perfect time comes, and only then can you properly unleash burst. The bright side is we don't need all of our cds to deal high amounts of damage, and we can influence the battlefield quite a bit while waiting for the perfect moment.

Unlike PvE Arcane, we don't care about our mana. Our sustained damage is just spamming Arcane Blast. If you run out of mana, you just Evocate back up. If you ran out of mana twice and everyone that needed to die is not dead yet, you're doing it wrong! What could you be doing wrong? Well, wasting damage. There's no point in spaming Arcane Blast at someone when you are not trying to pressure a healer or kill that someone. There really isn't anything wrong with sitting idle and not doing anything. If you're not in a situation where your damage is useful, then do not do damage.

Mark of Aluneth: This spell is unfortunately difficult to use in pvp. 2 seconds to cast it, and an additional 6 seconds for it to take effect is a LOT. Because of this, you do not want to use this spell if you don't have to. You have to use this spell if you intend to burst a Healer or a target with a Cooldown active. A great initiation combo is Polymorph into Mark of Aluneth into the one-shot macro. This combo will insure your target is dead within 6 seconds.

General Tips & Tricks:

Never cast Arcane Barrage. The only reason to ever dump your Arcane Charges is if you HAVE to finish someone, they are about to get out of range/get healed, and you just need that burst of instant damage. If there is a large group of enemies and you just WANT to aoe them, Arcane Barrage and then instantly Arcane Orb.

Arcane Explosion deals decent amounts of damage. If you just need to deal that last bit of damage to a melee character, go for it.

Use Invisibility for damage reduction. 60% off for 3 seconds is pretty singnificant - time it well!

I have prepared the following cheatsheet for those confused about our PvP rotation :